Unplanned electrical power outages are major concerns to power utilities throughout the whole world. Unfortunately, power outage will continue to happen and it cannot be fully prevented. Possible causes for such outages may be due to lightning strikes, tree encroachment or equipment failures. The impact of such incidents not only affects the consumer, but the power provider themselves. These impacts can be greatly reduced if power system operators are equipped with appropriate tools to analyze the root cause of the failure.
At the moment, power providers' record and store digitized information from digital fault recorders installed on each overhead line transmission systems. It is a common routine for an engineer to access each data stored by personally going to each overhead line transmission system.
A typical digital fault recorder stores raw data of three phase electrical signals and the condition of the overhead line transmission system. Each power outages provide a certain flashover signature depending on the cause of the outage. However, the digital fault recorder does not inform the faults which cause the outage. Currently there is no tool which analyses the flashover and identify the cause of the flashover.
It will be therefore desirable to have a system that is able to process the digitized information from the digital fault recorders to identify and notify the cause of the outage. It will also be desirable for a tool to perform decision making with minimal human intervention so as to take appropriate proactive steps or countermeasures.